Microsoft Marches Forward with Azure Announcements
According to the Azure Journal, Microsoft on October 15th released the SQL Azure October CTP (Commercial Technology Preview) 2. This CTP represents the complete feature set that will be available in the SQL Azure at PDC.
This CTP has been deployed to one of Microsoft’s go-live production clusters, one that is larger and more powerful than the machine cluster that has been supporting the August CTP. But it is a completely separate machine cluster serviced by a dedicated developer portal.
Microsoft said that accounts for all existing users of its August CTP have been automatically provisioned for access to its new October CTP and environment.
This is one of a slew of Microsoft Azure product announcements and enhancements in recent months.
Earlier in October, the company said that, at launch time, Windows Azure will feature an improved logging system and give users greater flexibility over what information is logged and how it is collected. Its first CTP provided a logging API, enabling developers to write custom messages to an append-only log.
The API was built on top of the event tracing capabilities of Windows. But Microsoft said its new logging system will enable IT managers to collect other kinds of data, too. One example: performance counters. Users can automatically push their logs to Windows Azure storage at specified intervals and in an easy-to-query format. In addition, users can reconfigure logging on an ad-hoc basis, meaning they won’t have to figure out up-front exactly what data they’ll need to debug problems. That can be decided as needed.
And back in September, Microsoft released a preview of the Windows Azure Service Management API to help IT managers, well, manage their deployments, hosted services and storage accounts. The API preview is REST-based, which means that users can code against in their toolset of choice to manage their services.
Curious? You can find the documentation (along with the rest of the Windows Azure documentation) here.
This Azure API uses X509 client certificates for authentication. Users can upload any valid X509 certificate in .cer format to the Windows Azure developer portal and then use it as a client certificate when making API requests.
This preview API currently supports:
Deployments – Viewing, creating, deleting, swapping, modifying configuration settings, changing instance counts, and updating the deployment.
Listing and viewing properties for hosted services, storage accounts and affinity groups.
Microsoft also made available a small tool, called csmanage.exe, to help IT managers interact with this API and manage deployments.